The changing face of war [infographic]

Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

In a world of 9.1 billion people…
where 61% of the world’s population lives in urban centers…
primarily with coastal cities as magnets of growth…
and the people within these cities becoming ever more connected…
with mobile phones as tools for destruction…

All aspects of human society — including, but not limited to, conflict, crime, and violence — are changing at an unprecedented pace. In Out of the Mountains The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla, counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen argues that conflict is increasingly likely to occur in sprawling coastal cities, in peri-urban slum settlements that are enveloping many regions of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia, and in highly connected, electronically networked settings. Illustrated in the infographic below are four powerful megatrends — population, urbanization, coastal settlement, and connectedness — which are creating challenges and opportunities across the planet for future cities and future conflicts.

David Kilcullen is the author of the highly acclaimed Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla, The Accidental Guerrilla, and Counterinsurgency. A former soldier and diplomat, he served as a senior advisor to both General David H. Petraeus and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent years he has focused on fieldwork to support aid agencies, non-government organizations and local communities in conflict and disaster-affected regions, and on developing new ways to think about complex conflicts in highly networked urban environments.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only current affairs articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.